After a four-month pause, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is again underway.

The New York Times reports that the next phase of the search will use "side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, multibeam echo sounders and video cameras" in hopes of finding the plane's wreckage in the Indian Ocean. The new phase of the search began on Monday, according to a statement from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

While the first phase of the search used surveillance flights in an attempt to detect ping signals from the plane, the new phase will focus on finding the underwater wreckage with sonar equipment.

No debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which was traveling from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, has yet been found, but officials are "cautiously optimistic" they will find the plane's wreckage, they told The Associated Press. The new phase of the search will use 3D maps, the first produced of the region where the plane is thought to have crashed. The new maps revealed that the water in the search area is home to volcanoes, crevasses, plateaus, and ridges, the Times reports, and the search will be "slow, given the terrain."

"They are searching the area of highest probability," Alec Duncan, a senior lecturer at the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, told the Times. "And if it is there, they will find it."- - Meghan DeMaria

SYDNEY, Australia — As searchers began a deep-sea hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on Monday, three-dimensional maps — the first produced of the remote region off the western Australian coast where the missing plane is thought to have run out of fuel — pointed to the huge scale of the task ahead.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a statement on Monday that one of the vessels involved, GO Phoenix, had arrived within the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean and was likely to stay 12 days before needing to refuel.

Two other ships — the Fugro Discovery and the Fugro Equator — will also join the search, which is concentrated along a long, thin arc that is thought to have been the plane’s flight path on March 8 before it disappeared.

Newly produced maps show that the area’s waters, beneath which are volcanoes, crevasses, plateaus and ridges, may be more than three and a half miles deep in places.

“It is rugged underwater terrain, a long way down,” said Alec Duncan, a senior lecturer at the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “It makes the next phase of the search much harder.”

The airliner had been traveling on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board but inexplicably turned off course and headed south. No debris has been found.

Transmissions from Flight 370, known as electronic handshakes, and an unsuccessful satellite phone call between Malaysia Airlines ground staff and the jet have allowed the Australian authorities leading the search to chart a narrow trajectory that the plane probably traveled.

“The complexities surrounding the search cannot be understated,” the Transport Safety Bureau said in a recent search update. “It involves vast areas of the Indian Ocean with only limited known data and aircraft flight information.”

But officials have said they remain cautiously optimistic that they will find the jet. They hope the next phase of the search, using side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, multibeam echo sounders and video cameras, will detect the plane’s wreckage on the seafloor.

The first phase of the search, an air and water-surface search that involved hundreds of surveillance flights covering about 1.7 million square miles, lasted 52 days. Searchers then used towed and autonomous listening devices in the hope of detecting “pings” from the plane’s data recorders. But no signals were detected, and no wreckage found.

Bathymetric surveys of the area’s ocean floor use a rainbow of colors to depict how the seabed rises from a golden-hued plateau on the northern edge of the Broken Ridge — an underwater volcanic plateau — and then drops into a ravine that could be more than four miles deep.

The new phase of the search involves towing sonar equipment that can detect wreckage miles underwater, but that search will be slow given the terrain. Some of the sonar operates best when towed around 650 feet from the seafloor. “And it may be towed on cable six miles long out the back of a vessel,” Dr. Duncan said. “You can’t be flying blind using that sort of equipment. That’s where the detailed maps come in.”

Dr. Duncan said an enormous amount of effort had gone into refining “what is essentially scant data in the plane’s last flying hours.”

“There are uncertainties associated with that,” he said. “They are searching the area of highest probability. And if it is there, they will find it.”

Never even realized - when I posted my latest reply - that the thread'd been moved from Albo's to Famous Dishes.

Mind you, I still very much sympathize with the crew, passengers and the families of Malaysian Airlines flight 777-200. For in our present world/globe, not óne civilian aircraft should suddenly completely vanish...

(And then there was MH17 mid July 2014, suddenly crashing over Ukrain. 298 Victims. Outright - albeit probably "by mistake" - shot from the skies by Vladimir Putin's secret mercenearies. A "Buk missile" crew, that had no official entrance into Ukrain..

About just as "secret" as his Russian FSB (former KGB) couple staunch friends, that caused a serious Polonium-210 traceable trail all across N-W Europe, when the Russian new Czar*) had one of his staunchest opponensts murdered in London, U.K. In broad daylight.

*) new CzarI've used to daily work with Russians. And with people from countries that, before 1989 (fall Berlin Wall), to their utter dismay belonged to the Russian influence sphere. By STASI - and, as time went by - even more technically sophisticated means.

We - meaning Western Europe - can easily beat the Russian Maffia that got permanent hold of / claws on, Vladimir Putin, if we decide we want to. Not kidding. And soon as we decide we want to.

Which is another matter. After all, EU Parliament imo is nothing but corruption, and never has been anything else.

A matter, however, that I refuse to see "acceptable" for scores and scores of innocent European families & their kids,

A matter that ought to finally convince us what's at stake, and to finally either FIGHT or SUBDUE anything that comes from behind eastern Frankfurt an der Oder.

Yes!

Peace, non-violence ever, is a lovely idea.

Until you run into the results/consequences of what Medieval Europe and Medieval Palestine/Middle East (Euphrat/Tigris), have left uncared for.